Stones / Water / Time / Breath

MARTHA'S VINEYARD: A filmed site-specific performance, with score, by American composer and editor Dean Rosenthal.

Body

This expression of Stones/Water/Time/Breath comes out of a performance I gave in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, of my text score of the same name. You can view the score alongside this video by following the download. In one respect, the score was composed in response to the many text scores I have encountered over years as a practicing artist. I had written off composing these kinds of scores because they seemed anachronistic and tendentious to the point of irrelevance. More recently, however, what became apparent through the work of my peers was that much remained to be said.

The performance that the video documents was given at a pond named Nine Mile Pond. This pond is located in my childhood hometown. To give the performance, I rented a car and drove to Wilbraham from where I was living in nearby Northampton. I arrived with my wife, Karin, just before sundown and we gathered rocks together. Then we found an appropriate location to play the piece, a small beach by the side of Boston Road. Karin set up a video camera and the performance lasted about 18 minutes, almost all of which you see here.

Stones / Water / Time / Breath
to Christian Wolff

Site-specific: outside, by the water, any body of water, like: a pond, the
ocean, a lake, a stream, a river...

Materials: stones. As many or as few as desired. Maybe they are already
there.

Performance:

Arrive, set a start time, start.

Use the stones as elements or implements to make percussive sounds on the
water.

Play the water with the stones.

Play singly, together, rhythmically, with solos, tuplets, common rhythms,
irregular rhythms, cycles, patterns, with no rhythms.

There can be pauses.

No speaking.

When you feel the piece has ended, end the performance.

For any number of performers.

Dean Rosenthal
May 12, 2012
Edgartown Great Pond

Dean Rosenthal is an American composer of instrumental and electronic music, sound installations, and field recordings. He also serves as co-editor of The Open Space Web Magazine and is a contributing editor to The Open Space Magazine.http://www.deanrosenthal.org/http://the-open-space.org/